mem0-mcp

An MCP server wrapping a self-hosted mem0 REST API, adding two things mem0 doesn't do on its own:

• Exact-content dedupe — identical adds within a time window are skipped before they reach mem0, saving an LLM extraction call per duplicate.

• Mention-aware retrieval reranking — memories that get reconfirmed over time rank higher than a pure similarity search would put them, without needing any extra calls to mem0 itself.

why reranking

mem0's default search ranks purely on embedding similarity. That's fine at low memory counts, but once you're into the hundreds, a fact that's been independently reconfirmed many times (e.g. "user prefers X") and a fact mentioned once in passing score identically if they're similarly worded. This adds a second signal: how often has this memory actually been reinforced, and how recently.

How it works:

1. add_memory first runs a similarity search for the new content against existing memories. A candidate scoring above REINFORCEMENT_PREFILTER_THRESHOLD isn't bumped directly — similarity score alone isn't precise enough (tested live: a genuine paraphrase scored 0.833 against its true target, while a separately-worded, topically-adjacent query scored 0.836 against a different, unrelated memory — both land in the same narrow band, so no single threshold cleanly separates a real match from a false one, since short facts sharing a subject/domain cluster tightly in embedding space regardless of whether they're really "the same" fact). Instead the judge LLM (JUDGE_LLM_BASE_URL) is asked directly whether the new content restates the candidate as the same fact; only a yes bumps its mention count (debounced to at most once per memory per window, so a single conversation re-mentioning the same fact several times doesn't inflate the count). Leaving JUDGE_LLM_BASE_URL unset disables this entirely rather than falling back to an unreliable threshold guess. Only after this does add_memory call mem0's own /memories endpoint to actually store the content — this detects reinforcement itself rather than relying on mem0's response to signal it, since in practice mem0's /memories response doesn't reliably surface it: near-duplicate content it classifies as "no update needed" is silently omitted from the response entirely (no event, no id), and a genuine UPDATE event only fires for a narrow same-memory-text-update judgment call that's rare in normal use.

2. search_memories over-fetches candidates from mem0's similarity search, then rescales each by:

   score = similarity × (1 + α · log(1 + mentions)) × recency
   recency = 0.5 + 0.5 · exp(-days_since_update / halflife)

   Recency has a 0.5 floor so old memories never fully vanish, just get deprioritized. All of this happens locally against a small SQLite table — no extra round-trips to mem0.

Mention counts are stored locally (SQLite, not in mem0's own metadata), which means they're only visible to whatever's calling through this MCP server — other clients hitting mem0 directly won't see or benefit from them. That's a deliberate tradeoff: writing mention counts back into mem0's own metadata would require a read-modify-write on every reinforcement (mem0's update endpoint needs the full text), which is a lot of extra complexity and API calls for a signal that's only used by this reranking step anyway.

Related MCP server: mem0-mcp

tools exposed

compatibility

Tested against a self-hosted mem0 server built from mem0ai 2.0.6. The reinforcement-detection approach (see above) deliberately doesn't depend on the event field mem0's /memories response returns, so it isn't tied to a specific mem0 version — it only needs the standard /memories and /search endpoints, which have been stable across mem0's 2.x releases including the newer ADD-only consolidation model (2.0.15+, where /memories always returns event: "ADD" and never UPDATE/NONE).

setup

Requires a running mem0 REST API server (see mem0ai/mem0 or your own deployment) reachable from this container.

cp .env.example .env
# fill in MEM0_URL and MEM0_USER_ID at minimum
docker compose up -d

Transport is streamable-http by default, listening on :8001. Set MCP_TRANSPORT=stdio for stdio instead.

All tuning knobs (dedupe window, mention debounce, reranking weights) are environment-overridable — see .env.example — no rebuild required to change them.

license

MIT